Saturday, 28 December 2013

When I was young, I was one of the few kids who would talk to a boy called Stephen Bristow. Son of "Timmy" Bristow. A walking mountain. Or, as one Judge described him in court, a "Walking Nightmare".

Oddly enough, he had a personal code of conduct that amounted to "Do unto others as they've done unto others, with interest.". The honest had nothing to fear. Others....

My mother disturbed an intruder in our house when coming home from shopping once. He fled, taking some items of considerable sentimental, though not monetary, value.

Tim Bristow got word of it.... We received them back in our postbox in a few days, with a misspelt crudely hand-written letter of apology that can only be described as "grovelling".

I saw Tim greet State Premiers (equivalent of Governors), Chief Stipendiary Magistrates (equivalent of Chief Justices) and other crooks. Only some of whom ended up in jail. He was on a first-name basis with them, as I can personally attest to.

Our family, very straight-laced, humdrum, ordinary, and ridiculously law-abiding, lived in a very different world from his. Yet somehow there was contact, even friendship. Tim Bristow phoned to give his condolences on my father's death in 1993, the last time I spoke to him.

There have been ex-cops turned "debt collector" since. None of them resemble Tim Bristow though.

Hermaphroditic infants are sex-assigned as kwolu-aatmwol, not as male. Those assigned as female are mistaken as normal females. Hermaphrodism is regarded as a sad and mysterious quirk.

The kwolu-aatmwol, unless distinguished as a shaman or war leader, is quietly disparaged. Yet several kwolu-aatmwol are well known in local history, and one of them, now deceased, was famed both as shaman and fight leader. The kwolu-aatmwol is therefore not rejected or frozen out of daily and normative social contacts, and may indeed rise to distinction through special achievements, as Sakulambei has done. Nor do Sambia feel disgust regarding these liminal beings. Still, Sambia is a sexually polarized society, and parents do not want infants to be hermaphroditic: the intersexed infant may be killed at birth by women, the men believe (Herdt 1981). If it passes as female, however, it is sure to survive.

Consequently, at birth, women carefully check the infant's sex to ensure that it is not
kwolu-aatmwol. When discovered at birth, the child is reared in the direction of masculinity, but not unambiguously; rather, it is referred to as kwolu-aatmwol or male, because parents know that their infant will not change into a female. Sometimes the kwolu-aatmwol as a child is teased and humiliated by peers for having "no penis." If parents feel ashamed or rejecting of the child, the mental health outcome is poorer (Herdt and Davidson 1988).

Five of the fourteen kwolu-aatmwol were reared as females. Two of these are still alive.

One late adolescent continues to live as a female, though she is unmarried, physically larger than a normal female, and is now known to be a kwolu-aatmwol. The other living subject is an older adult who was reportedly reared ambiguously as a female.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

China scored a stunning, history making success with the successful touchdown of the ambitious Chang’e-3 probe with the ‘Yutu’ rover on the surface of the Moon today, Dec. 14, on the country’s first ever attempt to conduct a landing on an extraterrestrial body.The dramatic Chang’e-3 soft landing on the lava filled plains of the Bay of Rainbows occurred at about 8:11 am EST, 9:11 p.m. Beijing local time, 1311 GMT today.The monumental feat is the first landing on the Moon by any entity in nearly four decades. It was broadcast live on CCTV, China’s state run television network.

Tuesday, 10 December 2013

Yet more evidence that MtoF and FtoM are not mirror-images, and that while saying "Trans women have female brains" captures the essence, and is useful as an initial step towards understanding, the reality is more complex than that. For that matter, cis women don't have female brains as such, yet men and women have statistical differences in neuro anatomy that correlate well with statistical differences in behaviour - such as sense of smell.

There is strong evidence of sex differences in mental rotation tasks.
Transsexualism is an extreme gender identity disorder in which
individuals seek cross-gender treatment to change their sex. The aim of
our study was to investigate if male-to-female (MF) and female-to-male
(FM) transsexuals receiving cross-sex hormonal treatment have different
patterns of cortical activation during a three-dimensional (3D) mental
rotation task. An fMRI study was performed using a 3-T scan in a sample
of 18 MF and 19 FM under chronic cross-sex hormonal treatment.
Twenty-three males and 19 females served as controls. The general
pattern of cerebral activation seen while visualizing the rotated and
non-rotated figures was similar for all four groups showing strong
occipito-parieto-frontal brain activation. However, compared to control
males, the activation of MF transsexuals during the task was lower in
the superior parietal lobe. Compared to control females, MF transsexuals
showed higher activation in orbital and right dorsolateral prefrontal
regions and lower activation in the left prefrontal gyrus. FM
transsexuals did not differ from either the MF transsexual or control
groups. Regression analyses between cerebral activation and the number
of months of hormonal treatment showed a significant negative
correlation in parietal, occipital and temporal regions in the MF
transsexuals. No significant correlations with time were seen in the FM
transsexuals. In conclusion, although we did not find a specific pattern
of cerebral activation in the FM transsexuals, we have identified a
specific pattern of cerebral activation during a mental 3D rotation task
in MF transsexuals under cross-sex hormonal treatment that differed
from control males in the parietal region and from control females in
the orbital prefrontal region. The hypoactivation in MF transsexuals in
the parietal region could be due to the hormonal treatment or could
reflect a priori cerebral differences between MF transsexual and control
subjects.

I used to be a great believer in "trickle-down". Up until 1980, there was evidence that it always worked. This evidence couldn't be ignored.

However,
I did not foresee that there was a tipping-point in the concentration
of wealth where it made far more economic sense to buy the government than to invest in plant.

This
means that regulations which restrain monopolistic and anti-competitive
practices are repealed or not enforced, while ever more burdensome
regulations that strangle upstart competitors at birth are enacted. The
more of the latter there are, the more persuasive the argument to relax
regulations against the big boys. The more the big boys get away with
murder, the more persuasive the argument for regulations and yet more
regulations that only affect the small end of town in practice.

Trickle-down
cannot help but grow an economy in an absolute sense; but when the
distribution is too concentrated, most of the growth ends up in the
hands of a very few, while the median standard stays steady, growing
very slowly. In pathological cases, not just all the growth, but over
100% of it ends up in the hands of those who control the legislatures,
and the median standard actually falls, as in the USA today.

This
leads to a runaway effect, where 1% of the populace holds more national
wealth than the rest of the country put together. The US hasn't reached
that state yet, but it's 40% in 2013, and likely to hit over 50% soon,
with 60, 70, 80% to come. The trend is clear, the concentration
accelerating.

The
result ' "too big to fail, too big to jail" is already visible.
Disrupting the system by putting the brakes on would cause economic
chaos, hence the need for bailouts and ever increasing corporate
welfare. There are already commercial organisations essentially immune
from legal sanction. Examples of CEOs paying less tax in absolute terms
than their secretaries, and ridiculously less in relative terms,
abound.

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking
power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs,
including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands
of murders just in the past 10 years – people so totally evil, jokes
former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys
on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations
linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped
countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in
between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided
countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an
attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery
investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of
illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual
fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different
about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first
time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of
criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC
might undermine the world economy.

"Had the U.S. authorities decided to
press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at
a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost
certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the
institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system
would have been destabilized."

Remember what I said : The
result ' "too big to fail, too big to jail" is already visible.
Disrupting the system by putting the brakes on would cause economic
chaos, hence the need for bailouts and ever increasing corporate
welfare. There are already commercial organisations essentially immune
from legal sanction. When it comes to wealth distribution... from HuffPo

The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth so that
it's in the league of corrupt underdeveloped countries, no longer in the
league of the developed nations, according to the latest edition of the
world's most thorough study of wealth-distribution.

The most authoritative source comparing wealth-concentration in the
various countries is the successor to the reports that used to be done
for the United Nations, now performed as the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. The latest (2013) edition of it
finds (p. 146) that in the U.S., 75.4% of all wealth is owned by the
richest 10% of the people.

Those are the top 20 developed nations, and the U.S. has
the most extreme wealth-concentration of them all. However, there are
some other countries that have wealth-concentrations that are about as
extreme as the U.S. For examples: Chile 72.5%, India 73.8%, Indonesia
75.0%, and South Africa 74.8%. The U.S. is in their league; not in the
league of developed economies. In the U.S., the bottom 90% of the
population own only 24.6% of all the privately held wealth, whereas in
most of the developed world, the bottom 90% own around 40%; so, the
degree of wealth-concentration in the U.S. is extraordinary (except for
underdeveloped countries).

The broadest mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called "Gini," and the higher it is, the more extreme
the nation's wealth-inequality is. The Gini for the U.S. is 85.1. Other
extremely unequal countries are (pages 98-101 of this report) Chile
81.4, India 81.3, Indonesia 82.8, and South Africa 83.6. However, some
nations are even more-extreme than the U.S.: Kazakhstan 86.7, Russia
93.1, and Ukraine 90.0. But Honduras and Guatemala are such rabid
kleptocracies that their governments don't even provide sufficiently
reliable data for an estimate to be able to be made; and, so, some
countries might be even higher than nations like Russia.

At current rates, the Gini for the USA will be in the low 90's by 2020: the trend is accelerating, not tailing off.

Monday, 9 December 2013

NCD 140.3, Transsexual SurgeryDocket No. A-13-47NCD Ruling No. 2December 2, 2013BOARD RULING THAT NCD RECORD IS NOT COMPLETE AND ADEQUATE TO SUPPORT THE VALIDITY OF THE NCD

The aggrieved party also argues that the NCD when issued was invalid and unsupported by the NCD record. The aggrieved party argues that the 1981 NCHCT report acknowledged the effectiveness of transsexual surgery in stating that “eight of the nine studies” that “represent[ed] the major clinical reports thus far published” between 1969 and 1980 on the outcome of the surgery “reported that most transsexuals show improved adjustment on a variety of criteria after sex reassignment surgery.”7 NCD Record at 1718. The aggrieved party also argues that the ninth, unfavorable, study on which the NCHCT relied was “severely flawed and ideologically biased,” and criticizes two of the sources cited in the 1981 NCHT report as ideologically biased against transgender individuals, based on their published writings. AP Statement at 5. We need not and do not address these arguments since we need not decide here whether the NCD record was complete and adequate to support the NCD at the time the NCD record was developed. In any event, our determination that the NCD record fails to account for developments in the care and treatment of persons with GID during the more than 30 years that have passed since the NCHCT issued its report containing the findings that HCFA adopted in issuing the NCD is, without more, a sufficient basis for our determination that the NCD record is not complete and adequate to support the validity of NCD 140.3.

7 The NCHCT discounted these findings on the ground that the eight favorable studies did not meet “the ideal criteria of a valid scientific evaluation of a clinical procedure.” NCD Record at 18.

In summary:

Based on the current record in this proceeding initiated by an acceptable NCD complaint from an aggrieved party, the Departmental Appeals Board (Board) has determined that the NCD (National Coverage Determination) record in this case “is not complete and adequate to support the validity of the NCD” denying Medicare coverage for transsexual surgery “for sex reassignment of transsexuals.” 42 C.F.R. § 426.525(c)(3); NCD 140.3. The submissions of the aggrieved party and the amici curiae, to which the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) elected not to respond to defend the NCD, demonstrate that the premises for the NCD, which was based on a 1981 review of medical and scientific sources published between 1966 and 1980, are not reasonable in light of subsequent developments. This proceeding will thus move on to discovery and taking of evidence as provided in 42 C.F.R. §§ 426.532 and 426.540. This ruling does not address the ultimate question of whether the NCD as written is valid under the reasonableness standard, but only whether the existing NCD record on which the NCD was based is complete and adequate to support its validity.

In other words... the recorded evidential basis for judging that treatment for Trans patients shouldn't be covered by Medicare is inadequate. There is considerable evidence that the conclusion was unjustified when it was made back in 1981, and the veritable mountain of evidence accumulated over the intervening third of a century has universally indicated that it was very wrong indeed. Certainly enough to overcome the burden of proof that the Aggrieved Party bears, and so great an amount that the CMS elected not to contest it.

The next step is to show that the ruling is not just unevidenced and unjustified, but that it is unreasonable and unjustifiable. The CMS may elect not to contest that proposition too, given the data.

This situation should have been reviewed decades ago, when there was possibly a shadow of doubt, rather than today when there's none. If this is treated in the same way as every other medical situation is treated, the result is a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, that's a big if.

Sunday, 8 December 2013

While several private American companies are planning robotic
missions to the moon, China launched a man-sized robotic scout to the
moon on Monday. The country’s recent manned missions and efforts to
build a new space base suggest a future manned mission to the moon,
though why is an open question. Speculation has run from the desire to
build a military missile base -- a Death Star of sorts -- to national
pride to simple economics.
The answer may be far simpler: The moon is “easy” to get to.
“If you’re still trying to test out your space legs, it’s a great
place to do it,” said one NASA engineer familiar with the agency’s
plans.

One small step for Man at a time.... this isn't a one-time stunt, it's a slow and methodical long-term exploration and colonisation effort.

Dennis Wingo, a space entrepreneur and author of the book “MoonRush,”
thinks the Chinese mission is about supporting the world’s exploding
population.
“China is spending billions on resource acquisition in Africa, South
America and other places around the world,” he told FoxNews.com. “If you
look at the design of their system for this mission, it is very much a
mineral prospector as much as a science mission.”
Yet America will not return to the moon, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden makes clear.
“NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Bolden said at an April panel in Washington.

China’s Chang’e 3 lander -- which should touch down on the moon in
mid-December -- will be the first controlled landing since the Soviet
Union’s Luna-24 mission in 1976.

China’s maiden moon landing probe successfully entered lunar orbit
on Friday, Dec. 6, following Sunday’s (Dec. 1) spectacular blastoff –
setting the stage for the historic touchdown attempt in mid December.
Engineer’s at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center (BACC) commanded
the Chang’e 3 lunar probe to fire its braking thrusters for 361 seconds,
according to China’s Xinhua news agency.
The do or die orbital insertion maneuver proceeded precisely as planned at the conclusion of a four and a half day voyage to Earth’s nearest neighbor.
...
Chang’e 3 is due to make a powered descent to the Moon’s surface on
Dec. 14, firing the landing thrusters at an altitude of 15 km (9 mi) for
a soft landing in a preselected area called the Bay of Rainbows or
Sinus Iridum region.
...
Chang’e 3 marks the beginning of the second phase of China’s lunar robotic exploration program.
The lander follows a pair of highly successful lunar orbiters named Chang’e 1 and 2 which launched in 2007 and 2010.
The next step will be an unmanned lunar sample return mission, perhaps by 2020.

Previous posts on this blog have followed China's careful, methodical, and above all, successful space colonisation effort for many years. Starting in July 2003.

Meanwhile, space officials said China hoped to launch a space probe
capable of orbiting the moon by 2005 or 2006, which would be the
nation's first lunar mission and would eventually lead to an eventual
landing on the moon by an unmanned Chinese lunar space craft.

Yes, they've been methodical. This is not some flash-in-the-pan Space Spectacular for no more worthy a goal than National prestige. It's not a Space Race
as such - because a Race implies that they're competing against some
other entity. No, after consulting my Crystal Ball, taking the auguries,
and examining the entrails of a goat, I think they're in it for the
long term. I'm not talking about Scientific missions to Mars, or even
Exploratory missions to the Moon. I'm talking about setting up a permanent presence.
Not next year. Not next decade, nor the one after that. But certainly
within the next 50 years. I think that they have a plan. A flexible one,
that will adapt to changing circumstances and unforeseeable problems,
but a plan nonetheless.

There was no funding for lunar
projects in the ten-year space plan approved in 2001. By July 2001 a
Chinese aerospace magazine indicated that Chinese scientists had drafted
a much more modest four-phase long term plan.

Monday, 2 December 2013

To quote Hoffnung, "I was born, through no fault of my own, at a very early age.". Or in my case, in 1958 in Earley, a small suburb of Reading, Berkshire, England. Or at least it was a suburb. Now its been swallowed up in Reading proper. Last time I was there (1986), the fields I used to watch the Foxhunters go through are now a high-density housing development ("Lower Earley", and you can't get much lower, I'm telling you...), and the stream I used to fish in is a concrete storm water drain.. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, and the song "Tar and Cement" comes to mind.

When I was 10 and at boarding school (a place called Bigshotte, which appears to have vanished with the snows of yesteryear), I got an unscheduled visit from my parents. Who informed me that in 2 weeks time we were emigrating to Australia. You can take the boy out of England, but you can't take England out of the boy, and it wasn't until 1988 that I finally decided to take out Australian Citizenship. I still retain dual nationality, though the England I came from no longer exists, but has been transformed into a diverse multi-ethnic European state. Overall, a great improvement, but not a place I can identify with very much.

Good Things, Bad Things

After attending Sydney Grammar School for 6 years, I entered Sydney University in 1976. My father was unemployed, my mother hospitalised. Not a good time. Things picked up, but then I had a number of life-threatening medical problems. Picked up a little brain damage from Encephalo-Meningitis (yes, I know, it shows...). Spent half my lectures zonked out from Painkillers. Operations etc. Nuff Said. For much of the time, I resided in International House (and this is a link well worth following up, the whole concept is a great idea).

Then I met Carmel for the second time, in 1980. Love at first sight. (The first time was when I was at Sydney Grammar, which is next to the Australian Museum. The one girl that I ever noticed as a schoolboy was a schoolgirl who I saw exactly once in the geological section. We both only realised we'd met there only a few years ago, as she remembered someone who looked exactly like me at the same time and place.)
Anyway, within 2 months of first meeting, we were engaged. Hey, she had her own copy of Panzerblitz! And a Model Railway! I figure I've blown about 10,000 years of Good Karma by meeting her, but it's been worth it and more.

A bit about my Brilliant Career*
* Career - To go downhill fast, without control

I graduated from Sydney University in 1981, with a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics. Since then, I've been CompSci-ing in various industries and businesses, but for the most part, doing what is euphemistically known as "defence work.". Some of the software I wrote early in my professional life performed according to specification in the Gulf War, on HMAS Brisbane.

I can remember joking that it would work with any Air Defence Doctrine, except possibly Saudi Arabia's, but what were the odds of that happening?

I've worked on software for a number of vessels in various Allied Navies. From analysis work on the 76mm gun system on the German Navy's new F-124, being Chief Designer for an Artificial Intelligence based Anti-Missile system for the Turkish Navy, to programming and design work on "very expensive machines that go PING" for submarines of the Israeli Defence Force, Hellenic Navy, Armada de Chile, Royal Swedish Navy, Italian Navy, and various others.

I've spent a ridiculous amount of my life peering into PPIs and Waterfall, DEMON and FRAZ displays, but also sunned myself on the Fantail of a Destroyer in the middle of the Pacific, relaxed watching a magnificent sunset in the Gulf of Thailand, and shared my personal space with half a tonne of high explosive sleeping on top of a Mk 48 Mod 3 torpedo.

In the course of my work, I've personally chiselled a hole through the Berlin Wall, inhaled Pad Thai (Thai Noodles) on the banks of the Chao Praya river in Bangkok, domiciled on the fabulously expensive Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, gotten nervous when the Air Raid sirens wailed in Seoul, Korea, and consumed with gusto Alaskan King Crab in Akron, Ohio.
It's been fun so far. (note from 2013: Now, talk about tempting Fate....this is what I wrote at the end.) Can't wait to see what happens next.

About Me

Actually, I am a Rocket Scientist.
Also hormonally odd (my blood has 46xy chromosomes anyway) and for most of my life, I looked male, and lived as one, trying to be the best Man a Gal could be. Anyway, in May 2005 that started changing naturally for reasons still unclear, and I'm now Zoe, not Alan : happier and more relaxed not to have to pretend any more.
UPDATE - reason now identified as the 3BHSD form of CAH.

Reviews

This blog, written by a rocket scientist, is a fascinating collection of information, both personal and scientific, regarding intersex, transsexualism and related psychosocial and psychosexual issues....It is erudite and heartfelt. Just read the posts about the passport issue. You won't know whether to laugh, weep or crawl into a ball and rock gently in a corner - an amazing person.- David---The reason I so appreciate bright, perceptive people - as opposed to ideologues whose intelligence does little to illuminate - is that they manage to both instruct and learn with a certain grace. Among such rarities in the transblogosphere is Zoe, whose direct speech and clear humanity always make her worth reading, even if one doesn’t always agree with her every conclusion.- Val---The following is a request for permission to archive your A.E.Brain blog site which we have wanted to do for several years...The Library has traditionally collected items in print, but it is also committed to preserving electronic publications of lasting cultural value....Since (1996) we have been identifying online publications and archiving those that we consider have national significance....We would like to include A.E.Brain blog site in the PANDORA Archive...-Australian National Library